Ladies' Conference

“Christian Women in a Modern World” was the theme of today’s ladies’ conference at our church. Hosting their very first conference was an exciting challenge for the church ladies, and they did a fantastic job! Women from half a dozen sister churches joined us for the event, for a total of about 100 or so in attendance.

Although the conference was scheduled to begin at 3 pm, true to Chilean time we started closer to 4 pm! We had two conference blocks, with games and small group sharing time and a lovely tea in between. Our conference speaker was a woman with a wealth of ministry and life experience who is 1 ½ years into a battle with cancer, a reality which gave added weight to the insights she shared from the Word of God.

She drew those insights from the lives of Daniel and his three friends, taken from their godly homeland in Judah into captivity in godless Babylon as young men (most likely between 15-18 years old) and how they remained steadfast and pure in the face of pressure to conform and succumb to the “pleasures” of the Babylonian courts.

She did not mince words when challenging the ladies to consider in which areas of our lives we may have unknowingly conformed to the ideals of this “modern world” in which we live – though she confessed that she knew some of what she said would offend some of those who listened!

I am thankful for the opportunity to be challenged, to interact with ladies I am coming to love and appreciate from our new church, to meet new ladies and get reacquainted with others from sister churches, and to serve in whatever small ways I could. Initially that meant singing special music, but it grew to include transporting the “data show” projector to/from another missionary family’s home and (yikes!) running it for the two sessions at the conference (which I found only when I arrived at the conference, and received an impromptu tutorial from the pastor.) I shared that tidbit with my husband after the fact, and all he could do was wait expectantly for the other shoe to fall … which it did … because halfway through the second session I could not get the projector/computer to work anymore and the speaker had to do her topic without slides! Thankfully the Lord can speak without the help of our modern technology!

My evening culminated with squeezing nine grown women into our 7-passenger “mini, minivan/station wagon” and getting us all safely home! Thank you, Lord! (: